For many small businesses, Microsoft 365 is just “Word, Excel, and Outlook.” You pay the monthly subscription, your team uses it for email and documents, and that’s it.

If this sounds familiar, you are likely wasting a significant portion of your monthly fee.

Microsoft 365 is not just software; it’s a powerful, integrated productivity suite. Using it for email alone is like buying a car and only ever using the radio.

Here are three tools you already pay for that can save your team hours, improve collaboration, and give you a real return on your investment.

1. For File Management: Use SharePoint

The Problem: You’re still saving files to a local server in the office or, even worse, “My Documents.” This makes remote work difficult, and you’re constantly emailing “Final_Report_v3_REAL.docx” back and forth. The Solution: SharePoint is your secure, shared hard drive in the cloud. It allows your entire team to access and work on the same documents, from anywhere, on any device. It has version control, so you can always roll back to a previous save, and its security is built-in.

2. For Teamwork: Use Microsoft Teams

The Problem: Your inbox is overflowing with endless internal email chains. Quick questions turn into long, confusing discussions that are impossible to track. The Solution: Teams is your company’s central hub for communication. It combines instant chat, video meetings, and file sharing all in one place. You can create “Teams” for different projects or departments, keeping all conversations and files organised and instantly accessible.

3. For Simple Automation: Use Power Automate

The Problem: Your team wastes time on repetitive, manual tasks. Things like saving email attachments to a specific folder, getting a notification when a file is changed, or copying data from one spreadsheet to another. The Solution: Power Automate is a simple tool that lets you build “workflows” to automate these tasks. You can create simple rules, like “When an email with an invoice arrives, save the attachment to the ‘Invoices’ folder in SharePoint.”

How HDP IT Services Can Help

Making the switch from old habits requires a plan. At HDP IT Services, we are cloud optimisation experts. Our Silver and Gold plans include Proactive Cloud Infrastructure Management to ensure your M365 environment is secure and running perfectly.

For our Gold partners, we go a step further. We include a Quarterly Workflow Automation Review where we personally identify a manual process in your business and build an automation to fix it, saving you time and money every single month.